Mea Culpa: we say Marseilles, they say Marseille, and it sounds the same

Foreign cities, italics, underestimation and an inelegant variation in this week’s Independent

Petit Nice on the Corniche, Marseille or Marseilles?

Following the great Bombay-Mumbai controversy, there seems surprisingly little interest in how we spell the southern French port city that is co-hosting an association football tournament. We seem to use Marseilles and Marseille roughly equally.

Amol Rajan, our Editor at Large, recently suggested we should call the Indian city Bombay, because the cause of Mumbai has been pressed by Indian nationalists of unsavoury stripe. I agree with him, but most of our writers have already got used to the Indianised name.

Call me old-fashioned, but I also prefer the older, anglicised Marseilles. The French don’t bother with the final s, which is surprising for a people who don’t bother to pronounce most of the letters they do use, especially those towards the ends of words. As the s doesn’t affect how it is pronounced anyway, perhaps it doesn’t matter how we spell it.

Breakfast serial: We wrote on Tuesday about how the word “Brexit” had failed to catch on in discussion in the US about our referendum. This proves that the Americans are not always wrong about the English language. “It sounds,” the British comedian John Oliver surmised on his weekly HBO cable show, “like a disastrous brand of health bar,” we reported, adding: “Surely Wheetabix was somehow on his mind.”

There is no h in Weetabix and there was no need to italicise the brand name. Traditionally, we italicise the names of newspapers (including our own, although we are now digital-only) and ships, along with the titles of books, plays, TV programmes and films.

The online Independent often doesn’t italicise at all – it is rarely necessary – but this was an unusual case of too much italicisation. Later on in the article we also italicised “the BBC”. We italicise the names of its programmes, such as Newsnight or EastEnders, but not the corporation that broadcasts them.

Under or over: Underestimating things is a common hazard for a writer. We underestimate the chances of saying the opposite of what we mean. On Tuesday we said: “It is hard to underestimate the weight of the decision the Brits will make this week.”

That is possibly true, but what we meant was that the decision was so heavy that it was difficult to give it a value that was too high.

The Queen quilled: One of the worst writerly synonyms is “pen”, used instead of “write”. We had a specially inapt example of it on Thursday in our report of the Queen thanking people on Twitter for their birthday messages. “In case anyone wondered whether the tweet had been penned by one of her press officers rather than the Queen herself,” we penned, “minutes later another tweet appeared confirming: ‘This tweet was personally sent by Her Majesty The Queen.’”

I know Twitter uses an icon of a quill for writing a tweet, but this was not an occasion when we wanted to conjure an image of Her Majesty using a fountain pen. Especially as the report was illustrated with a photograph of the Queen warily poking an iPad.